In early 2015 three women living year-round in Marsa Matruh — a former Alexandria tour-operator turned mother of two, a French-Egyptian translator with one school-age child, and a retired biology teacher with grown grandchildren — found themselves answering the same emailed questions every summer. Which beach has shade. Which museum opens on Friday. Whether the El Alamein museum has a toilet. Whether you need a 4×4 for Siwa. The same five questions, every June, from a different family each time. The proposal came out of a Friday morning coffee on the corniche: write the answers down, date them, put them online, and stop having to rewrite the same email twice a week from May to September.
The first edition went online in April 2015 under the working name Matruh Family Notes. We registered the L.L.C. in May 2016 once the subscriber count justified a formal accountancy arrangement, and renamed to Marwa Family Guides in 2017 — Marwa is the first name of our co-founder Marwa Hashem and the desk has carried her name since. The scope has expanded from the original Matruh focus to cover the wider Mediterranean coast (east to El Alamein, west to the Libyan border) and the Siwa Oasis as a major day-trip add-on; the Alexandria day-trip file in the footer is the most recent addition, from 2023.
The original editorial standard has held throughout. Every claim dated and signed. No commission income from any listed business. Every family-relevant claim — "this beach has shade", "this museum has a child-suitable route", "this restaurant will serve plain rice for a fussy toddler" — observed on the ground with at least one of our three resident kids before publication. Subscribers can request the underlying dated photograph for any factual claim, and we have honoured every such request since the policy was introduced in 2018.
The three editors below cover the coast geographically between them. Each is responsible for the field verification cycle of their assigned files and for the bilingual translation of any Arabic-language governorate notice that falls inside their patch. All three are parents living in Marsa Matruh year-round.
Former Alexandria tour-operator (2003–2013) and the desk's namesake. Mother of two (now teenagers; they were 4 and 7 when the desk opened in 2015 and have effectively grown up beta-testing every file). Edits the Marsa Matruh beaches and Agiba files.
French-Egyptian translator with twenty years living between Marseille and Marsa Matruh. Mother of one school-age child. Edits the El Alamein memorial file, the family-museums file, and the Alexandria day-trip footer file.
Retired biology teacher (35 years in the Matruh governorate school system). Grandmother of four. Edits the Siwa day-trip file and the corniche-walks file. She is the standing contact for the Salama-district office and reads incoming desk mail.
The bench rotates every two years. Each contributor is paid a fixed stipend out of subscription revenue and writes between two and four signed pieces for the archive during their term.
University of Reading, military history department. Two-year term through 2027; contributes the supplementary historical notes to the El Alamein file, including the Commonwealth War Graves Commission liaison work and the Italian-cemetery side of the memorial story.
Alexandria Marine Sciences Faculty. Two-year term through 2027; contributes the ecology notes for the family-museums file (the marine-life sections) and the seasonal water-quality checks on the published beach files.
| Year | What changed |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Project launched under the working name Matruh Family Notes. Three files at start: Marsa Matruh beaches, Agiba Beach, Rommel Cave Museum. |
| 2016 | L.L.C. formally registered in Marsa Matruh. Subscription model opened with a single Reader tier at €6 per month. |
| 2017 | Renamed Marwa Family Guides. Siwa day-trip file added after a year of family scouting trips. Two-tier subscription model (Reader + Library). |
| 2019 | Bilingual edition launched. Every public file carries an Arabic-language précis from this date. |
| 2021 | El Alamein memorial file added after the major museum refurbishment reopened. The Field subscription tier launches with the first printed quarterly Family Notebook. |
| 2023 | Alexandria day-trip file added to the footer, addressing the recurring question about combining the Matruh-base trip with a single day at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the Corniche. |
| 2024 | The site moves to its current domain at kunhauu.cyou. Public change log becomes visible on every file. Two-year contributor bench formalised with Dr. Adcock and Dr. Salama. |
| 2026 | Family-museums file (covering five separate institutions across the coast) released. Editorial team confirmed at three resident editors for the foreseeable horizon. |
The funding mix is the single most important reason the desk can write what it does. If we earned a commission on bookings made through listed hotels or beach clubs, we would have an incentive to keep them on the file past their point of failure. We have chosen a structure that removes that incentive entirely.
"Verified" is overused on travel-content sites and almost meaningless on most of them. On the Marwa Family Guides files the word has a defined meaning, set out in our internal style guide since 2017 and worth repeating here for any family making a decision about whether the subscription is worth their money.
A claim on these pages is verified when an editor has personally observed it on the ground in the previous 120 days, has dated and signed the field note in the bound notebook held at the Salama-district office, and has reconciled it against any standing public statement issued by the relevant authority. For the beaches and corniche, the relevant authority is the Matruh governorate tourism office. For the museums, the directorate of each institution. For El Alamein, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and the German and Italian commissions in parallel. For Siwa, the South Sinai Nature Conservation Sector. A claim with one source is published as provisional with the source named openly. A claim sourced only to commercial third-party guidebooks is not published at all.
If we cannot defend it in writing after a Friday lunch with our own kids, it does not go on the page.
The change log at the foot of every file records every published revision with the date, the editor signature, and a one-sentence note describing what changed. The log is append-only; corrections appear as new dated entries and the previous entries remain visible. This is the single most important structural difference between this desk and a content-marketing site that updates pages silently.
Subscribers at the Library and Field tiers can request the underlying dated photograph for any single published claim on any file, answered inside two working days. We have honoured every such request since the policy was introduced in 2018; the cumulative count to date is 147.
The Marsa Matruh beaches file and the Siwa day-trip file are the two longest. Either is a fair test of whether the editorial standard is what we say it is.